The nationalist 'type', able to transfer a zealous belief in one ideology entirely to an opposing ideology.

Instability. The intensity with which they are held does not prevent nationalist loyalties from being transferable. To begin with, as I have pointed out already, they can be and often are fastened up on some foreign country. One quite commonly finds that great national leaders, or the founders of nationalist movements, do not even belong to the country they have glorified. Sometimes they are outright foreigners, or more often they come from peripheral areas where nationality is doubtful. Examples are Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, de Valera, Disraeli, Poincare, Beaverbrook. The Pan-German movement was in part the creation of an Englishman, Houston Chamberlain. For the past fifty or a hundred years, transferred nationalism has been a common phenomenon among literary intellectuals. With Lafcadio Hearne the transference was to Japan, with Carlyle and many others of his time to Germany, and in our own age it is usually to Russia. But the peculiarly interesting fact is that re-transference is also possible. A country or other unit which has been worshipped for years may suddenly become detestable, and some other object of affection may take its place with almost no interval. In the first version of H. G. Wells's Outline of History, and others of his writings about that time, one finds the United States praised almost as extravagantly as Russia is praised by Communists today: yet within a few years this uncritical admiration had turned into hostility. The bigoted Communist who changes in a space of weeks, or even days, into an equally bigoted Trotskyist is a common spectacle. In continental Europe Fascist movements were largely recruited from among Communists, and the opposite process may well happen within the next few years. What remains constant in the nationalist is his state of mind: the object of his feelings is changeable, and may be imaginary.

If the summary of his book in that Private Eye piece is anything to go by, Peterson's importance has probably been greatly overstated by both his detractors and his fanboys. Clearly a lot of young men on 4chan and Reddit, who have bad facial hair and anime T-shirts and say "actually" too much, are going to treat him like a god while a lot of young women on Tumblr, with blue hair and lip rings and a penchant for the word "literally", are going to make him the object of their Two Minutes Hate. And I strongly suspect everyone else will have forgotten about him in a couple of years.

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Jordan Peterson is not really an intellectual. That much must be certain from how generalizing and misinformed his criticism of post-modernism thought is. It's basically just a cartoonish and slightly off-track diluted version of what Chomsky said about them. I'm pretty sure the main difference is that Chomsky only decided that he didn't understand a word of Derrida (hence the obsurification claims) after he actually read him, whereas Peterson most likely hasn't opened up a book and at least not without heavy preconceptions.

I think Peterson's main fault in this tyrade against his cultural marxist boogeymen is that he got too riled up by the tension and strayed off course from what he's knowledgable about (and actually pretty insightful about too), which is the psychological motivations behind the individual's and collective's adoptation of certain philosophies and schools of thought. In this regard, his arguments about the deceiving appeal to young people by both the radical left and right (and nihilism for that matter) is actually worth taking notes on.

Instead, he started to criticize the actual philosophies that he sees as underpinning, most prominently, the radical left movement of today. In this field, he's not that insightful and far from the first thinker to even raise the critique that he puts forward.

The labelling of him as alt-right is so fucking pathetic and embarrassing, though. The fact that he (a self-proclaimed liberal) has become the intellectual saviour of the right says a great deal more about the lack of nuance in public discourse than it does about him.

But they're ALL self proclaimed liberals, Pinker, Dawkins, Harris etc... 'rationalists' with some specialist background who somehow end up regurgitating and amplifying right wing talking points with metronymic regularity.

Left and Right are subjective terms though, and are defined relatively to your own position on the spectrum. Dawkins gets called 'right-wing' mainly because he doesn't subscribe to the leftist orthodoxy that Islam is above criticism, for example. Ditto Harris, from what I know of him (very little, admittedly).

So if you're somewhat to the left of Karl Marx then of course liberals are going to seem right-wing. By exactly the same token, hardline American conservatives use the words "liberal" and "socialist" interchangeably.

Jordan Peterson is not really an intellectual. That much must be certain from how generalizing and misinformed his criticism of post-modernism thought is. It's basically just a cartoonish and slightly off-track diluted version of what Chomsky said about them. I'm pretty sure the main difference is that Chomsky only decided that he didn't understand a word of Derrida (hence the obsurification claims) after he actually read him, whereas Peterson most likely hasn't opened up a book and at least not without heavy preconceptions.

I think Peterson's main fault in this tyrade against his cultural marxist boogeymen is that he got too riled up by the tension and strayed off course from what he's knowledgable about (and actually pretty insightful about too), which is the psychological motivations behind the individual's and collective's adoptation of certain philosophies and schools of thought. In this regard, his arguments about the deceiving appeal to young people by both the radical left and right (and nihilism for that matter) is actually worth taking notes on.

Instead, he started to criticize the actual philosophies that he sees as underpinning, most prominently, the radical left movement of today. In this field, he's not that insightful and far from the first thinker to even raise the critique that he puts forward.

The labelling of him as alt-right is so fucking pathetic and embarrassing, though. The fact that he (a self-proclaimed liberal) has become the intellectual saviour of the right says a great deal more about the lack of nuance in public discourse than it does about him.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying here, but that last paragraph; I couldnt really care less about labelling him altright or not, but I hardly think its pathetic and embarrassing to point out some very obvious parallels, namely their anti-feminism.

I dont know that much about him but I certainly wont be taking any notes from the fucker about anything from what I have seen. He's just so awful, worse than milo really.

But they're ALL self proclaimed liberals, Pinker, Dawkins, Harris etc... 'rationalists' with some specialist background who somehow end up regurgitating and amplifying right wing talking points with metronymic regularity.

That's still the guilt by association argument. We're talking about a guy who has spent over three decades of his life lecturing against the dangers of the radical right and people are calling him a fascist because he took a picture with some guys that had a flag with a meme frog on it.

[QUOTE=Mr. Tea;344141]Whether you even agree with anything he says in that interview is pretty irrelevant. Newman spends half an hour mangling every single thing he says into something totally different. It's pathetic. It's not that he comes out of it looking like a genius, it's that she makes herself look like a complete arse.

If C4 had wanted to debunk his ideas, they should at least have put him up against someone able and willing to engage with him instead of going "So what you're saying is" for 30 minutes.

Also, lol at "every other time I've seen him". I've watched this one interview - if anyone here is obsessed with him it would appear to be

Why is what he says in the video irrelevant? Why put all the focus on her?

the appeal of the video is him supposedly "destroying", "demolishing" and even "raping" a "radical feminist" apparently, from a casual glance at youtube. This guy fuels this type of stuff. Certainly wouldnt post it on my fb wall, unless it was to point out he's a cock..

I agree with a lot of what you're saying here, but that last paragraph; I couldnt really care less about labelling him altright or not, but I hardly think its pathetic and embarrassing to point out some very obvious parallels, namely their anti-feminism.

I dont know that much about him but I certainly wont be taking any notes from the fucker about anything from what I have seen. He's just so awful, worse than milo really.

I think the name-calling thing is especially important. He obviously has a strong animosity towards anything related to his notion of what post-modernism is, which includes social constructs, but in the grand scheme of things he is still quite nuanced. A lot of people who aren't remotely right-wing clearly see him as a voice of reason and if figures like him are dismissed by default, it's just going to fuel the polarisation. I disagree with him on most of his stuff atm, too, but I think supporting the credibility of people like him isimportant to establishing stable middle ground in the political spectrum for young people to navigate.

Whether you even agree with anything he says in that interview is pretty irrelevant. Newman spends half an hour mangling every single thing he says into something totally different. It's pathetic. It's not that he comes out of it looking like a genius, it's that she makes herself look like a complete arse.

If C4 had wanted to debunk his ideas, they should at least have put him up against someone able and willing to engage with him instead of going "So what you're saying is" for 30 minutes.

Also, lol at "every other time I've seen him". I've watched this one interview - if anyone here is obsessed with him it would appear to be

Why is what he says in the video irrelevant? Why put all the focus on her?

the appeal of the video is him supposedly "destroying", "demolishing" and even "raping" a "radical feminist" apparently, from a casual glance at youtube. This guy fuels this type of stuff. Certainly wouldnt post it on my fb wall, unless it was to point out he's a cock..

That stuff is nasty, but you can't blame Peterson fueling it. He handles himself well and is polite to her throughout inspite of incessant ad hominem spewing from her side. If anyone is to blame, it's her for providing a strawman of her own cause and validating the alt-right in their notion of feminism as breeding hostility towards men.

That's still the guilt by association argument. We're talking about a guy who has spent over three decades of his life lecturing against the dangers of the radical right and people are calling him a fascist because he took a picture with some guys that had a flag with a meme frog on it.

You mean like the way Hitchens spent decades of his life lecturing against the dangers of colonialism and then embraced the joys of bombing the natives when his bank balance shrank?

All I know about Peterson is what's surfaced in recent times. His screeds against the totalitarianism of political correctness on University campuses, blaming the rise of the right on radical feminism, claiming that white privilege is a myth, promulgating the cultural marxist drivel so beloved by white nationalists, condemning nearly the entire field of social science because of the corrupting influence of communist and marxist thought.

These are pretty much textbook examples of how various shades of alt-right thought identify themselves and we've seen this before in the other examples Ive given, specialist rationalist thinkers whose arrogance and lack of self awareness leads them to stray outside their fields into shoddily researched pseudo political ground whilst providing a liberal patina for right wing ideology.

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Peterson was one of those things that once i'd first heard of him i coudnt stop hearing about him. hes like a canary in a coalmine. an early warning system. if someone one facebook you know starts sharing peterson stuff just block them now and save yourself some hassle. in a couple of weeks they'll be sharing 'feminism is cancer' memes.